Google has always had a dessert nomenclature for all its versions of Android. In a blog the Google has officially named the next version of Android, Android 10. This breaks the 10-year history of naming releases after desserts. In its new naming it means this year is Android 10, next year will be Android 11, and so on.
Google has been silent on what it will name its next version of Android and for long speculations have been on keeping people guessing what Q dessert the company will use. Google has decided it is a quaint tradition that needed to be quite quashed — or at least quelled. Instead, the codename will be quarantined inside Google.
Alongside the new name is an updated logo for Android 10, one that Aude Gandon, global brand director for Android, says has a “more modern” wordmark. Importantly, it will always include the little green robot. “The robot is what makes Android special. It makes it human, fun, and approachable,” Gandon says.
Android 10 makes sense
Going with a new naming scheme for the 10th version of Android makes a bit of sense; it’s a landmark release. Still, given how difficult it is to put a common dessert to the letter Q, I noted to Google’s Sameer Samat, VP of product management for Android, that it was awfully convenient that Google picked this release to switch up the naming scheme. He said that;
“We’re going to deal with that skepticism, Google’s actual reason for switching the naming, he says, isn’t that Q is hard, but rather that desserts aren’t very inclusive. We have some good names, but in each and every case they leave a part of the world out. Android is a global brand, used by more people in India and Brazil than in the US, so going with an English word for the dessert leaves some regions out. Pie isn’t always a dessert, “lollipop” can be hard to pronounce in some regions, and “marshmallows aren’t really a thing in a lot of places. Numbers, at least, are universal.
While the official name of Android will just be Android 10, that isn’t stopping the Android team from creating internal codenames in alphabetical order. Samat tells me that Google’s engineers have already chosen the word they’ll use internally for Android R.
